Mamdani’s Panopticon Burden: To Inherit The Hardened And Databased Political Epistemology Of The Security State(s)? Understanding Israel Palestine podcast

Content provided by KKFI 90.1 FM. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by KKFI 90.1 FM or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://podcastplayer.com/legal.

Understanding Israel Palestine »
Mamdani’s Panopticon Burden: To Inherit the Hardened and Databased Political Epistemology of the Security State(s)?

3d ago 28:29

MP3•Episode home

Send us a text

Mamdani’s Panopticon Burden: To Inherit the Hardened and Databased Political Epistemology of the Security State(s)?

By Jeremy Rothe-Kushel Host/Producer, Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls

New York City is a paradox disguised as a metropolis. Above, the glass-and-steel canyons of Midtown reflect the accumulated wealth of empire—the real estate dynasties, the hedge funds, the global insurers. But beneath the asphalt, pulsing through fiber-optic cables and radiating from the microwave dishes atop One Police Plaza, lies a second, silent city: a digital autocracy. The invisible city does not vote. It watches, and targets. It is a “Ring of Steel” that has metastasized from a temporary post-9/11 shield into a permanent, self-governing intelligence agency.

On this broadcast of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls, we descend into the friction point where local governance meets global counter-insurgency. We are joined by Ali Winston, an award-winning investigative journalist whose forensic reporting - including for WIRED, The Guardian, ProPublica, and The Baffler, among many others - regularly exposes police corruption, right-wing extremism, and surveillance.

Our point of departure is Winston’s incendiary new reporting: “Zohran Mamdani Just Inherited the NYPD Surveillance State.” It documents a profound collision: Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, whose platform was built on the promise of Palestinian rights and systemic reform, now holds the keys to a machine built to repress those very ideals.

It is a machine currently operated by Commissioner Jessica Tisch—a scion of the very financial and real estate interests that fought Mamdani’s rise.

I. Ground Zero and the Architecture of Paranoia

To understand the burden Mamdani has inherited, we must first perform an autopsy on the psychic break of September 11, 2001. As Winston details, the trauma of Ground Zero did not just militarize the police; it fundamentally altered its constitutional DNA.

“The NYPD transitioned,” Winston explains, “from a law enforcement agency into essentially a small to mid-sized intelligence agency.”

Under the “Never Again” doctrine of Commissioner Ray Kelly, the department imported David Cohen, a veteran CIA executive, to run its Intelligence Division. The result was a domestic force operating with foreign rules. Winston describes the creation of the “Demographics Unit”—a secret squad that engaged in “mosque-raking,” mapping Muslim communities from New Jersey to Long Island not based on criminal suspicion, but on the “pre-crime” logic of identity. This digital dragnet was matched by a physical one: Stop and Frisk, turning the bodies of Black and Brown New Yorkers into data points for the machine.

II. The Towering Shadow: The Iron Triangle of the Permanent State

The surveillance state does not float in the cloud; it is anchored in the bedrock of Manhattan real estate and the liquidity of Wall Street.

As reports break - just in the days after our interview - that Mamdani and Tisch have officially scheduled their first transition meeting, the question of her retention moves from theoretical to imminent.

In the broadcast, I drew attention to the “top 10 list” of donors who backed Andrew Cuomo against Mamdani. These figures seem to sit at the epicenter of an ossified “Iron Triangle”: Financialization, Real Estate, and Political Zionism. While not explicitly named in our dialogue, this anti-Mamdani donor class—which notably included direct funding from Tisch’s own family members and was typifie

124 episodes

#Society #Politics #News #Documentaries #History #Israel #KKFI 90.1 FM